Friday, November 3, 2017

Foucault Friday

This book first arose out of a
passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage,
all the familiar landmarks of my thought — our thought,
the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography — breaking up all
the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame
the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to
disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and
the Other. This passage quotes a "certain Chinese encyclopedia" in
which it is written that "animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the
Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous,
(g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j)
innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher,
(n) that from a long way off" look like flies". In the wonderment of
this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by
means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of
thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of
thinking that.